animate windows maximazing or minimizing not working

Hi!

I have a problem that's been the cause of my frustration for months. I've stumbled upon this forum and noticed your expertise Shawn and really hope you can help me fix this annoyance.
Some time ago I used a program, whose name I can't recall unfortunately (some UI tweaking thingy), which disabled window animations in my Vista. Actually it messed up some other stuff as well but I've already sorted that out and that's the last issue I have. Even though window animations, fade in/out effects are checked in configuration settings they don't work.
I've tried unchecking them and checking again in hope Windows will enable the animations but to no avail.
I've also tried to enable them manually through registry following a guide on a different site without success.
Of course I have Aero enabled. 2GB RAM and it had worked before so I exclude hardware problem.
Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

create a shortcut. see pic, put same info in the target area

Thanks for such a prompt reply!!!

Executing the shortcut made some visual glitches. I guess it restarted aero.
However, the problem persists